Rain on my parade

"Have you been to the castle?" has without fail, been one of the first questions anyone from Himeji comes up with, right after "where are you from?" Yesterday was our town festival, I think it's called the Castle festival, probably because that's really all the town is. I was quite happy when I got there, to find that there was free admition for the day (normallly about $6) and initially started out with a group of Japanese boys who had some sort of English knowledge. Anyway, the castle was pretty cool, the main tower is 5 stories high plus a basement. Just about anywhere they could think to stick a weapons rack they most certainly did. However, only a few of these still had any weapons on display. The inside was all made of enormous wood beams, and the whole inside smelled like an old wood mill. It's a pretty impressive building, with most things having english translations. After the castle, i exited the main keep and the big park in front of it was filled with big groups of people dancing and playing instruments. After a little while, I realized they were just warming up for something, so I grabbed my bike and headed out of the castle grounds. Just south of the castle is the main road in town, leading away from the castle down to the train station. Now, in the US people bring their own lawn chairs but here, the city unrolls big blue plastic ribbons down either side of the road, about two and a half feet wide and extending down the extent of the parade route. When I arrived, the road was filling up as people took off their shoes, and found a place on the blue tarps.
What ensued was one of the longest parades I have ever seen. I think about half of Himeji must have been in this thing. It started out with a couple of marching bands, some baton twirlers, lots of people dressed in yukata (summer kimonos) dancing with long bamboo rods with big ribbons on them. Everything was very coordinated. The most impressive, skill-wise thing I saw was the elementary school children's unicycle brigade. No kidding. has anyone ever tried to ride one of those things? It's damn near impossible. But there were about twenty of these kids, most on regular sized cycles, but four on extra tall ones, probably about three or four feet up. And they were all doing formations. The smaller kids would ride in line, then make circles, link hands and spin each other. And at the same time, the taller unicyclers would be circling the smaller cycles, then someone would blow a whistle and they'd all rush into a new formation. It was amazing. Then there were lots more yukata, lots of synchronized traditional dancing. I was very impressed with the umbrella twirlers. I have pictures. Then there was a big show of everyone who owned a Jeep. Then I was very confused, but a big line of special motorcycles, a few with American flags on them, but all Japanese people. One guy wearing a darth vader mask. Lots of Taiko drumming off of trucks. Cute kids banging small drums and dancing together. And slow. They were very spread out, they would wait for the last group to get halfway down the street before starting the next group "moving" or proceeding very very slowly. At one point it started to rain, but it quickly cleared up and the parade went on.
Then to the side they had lots of tents set up with fried things and Japanese fair food. I had the mushy octopus balls again. I should have tried the whole squid, maybe next time.
Then everyone sort of disappeared from the area, and I followed the crowd down to the other end of the street, and it was filled with mostly women in matching yukata by group. I have no idea what they were doing,but there must have been at least two or three hundred of them. They were all lined up, on either side of the street. At "san, ni, ichi!" they started playing some song in Japanese and everyone starting doing the same dance slowly walking around in this big rectangular loop. Everytime the song would end, it would loop back around and started over. I got very bored watching, this, it seemed to go on forever. So I found the center of activity, and there was some sort of booth watching all the groups, I don't know if it was some sort of competition or what. Anyway, it turned out that there wasn't a tape, it was one guy singing the same thing over and over for at least half an hour. Then it stopped, more japanese announcements, and then it started up again. I was about to leave, then I thought I would stick around and see if I could figure out what was happening. Well, I couldn't. After another extraordinary long period it all of a sudden stopped, and people just sort of wandered off. Most of the people looked extremely bored to be doing this, they had blank faces and just sort of waved their hands in the right direction. Occasionally, there would be an older person, who had no idea what was going on, and would either just be wandering like a zombie, or completely out of sync with the group. Occassionally there would be the enthusiastic person, but they were the exception.
After this ended, they had a big screen come in on a truck, which played a slide show of himeji sites to a big drum and japanese flute player.
Oh yeah, another interesting part of the parade were the people playing some sort of curved recorder instument with baskets on their heads, that was weird.
Afterwards, I went to this local bar that one of the Americans at my apartment works at, and hung out with him and the owner. At one point, they got really busy and ran out of glasses for drinks, so I ended up behind the bar washing dishes. In exchange for my services, I got a free drink, yay! which is good, because the cheapest drinks here are $5. And that is how I ended up washing dishes at an African American bar in Japan.
Allison